Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Makin' it (t)rain

So, the knee is all good and I've been upping my running quite a bit. I had just over 10 hours last week, with some quality hill work and a couple of decent long runs. In Chile, when I was in shape, I had strung together several months of 12-14 hour weeks, mostly structured around back-to-back long runs in the mountains...a tried-and-true staple of ultrarunning to be sure and just something I find fun on the weekend.

Then as well as now, I really don't follow a very formal training plan. I tally my weekly running hours and I make notes about how each day feels. I try to make sure I get one hard hill day, one day of some faster flatter running and at least one long run (if not two, for that sweet-ass B2B).

One thing that I have always done with my running that is maybe a lil' more structured (in the sense that it involves specific times/distances) is revisit certain routes and track my times for them. Not ground-breaking exercise science by any stretch or a unique idea at all...but it has been the only form of Training (with a capital "t") that I've been able to implement consistently. I do enjoy track running, but if I'm not literally living across the street from one then I don't keep at it over the long term (which I used to do in two different places I've lived).

Around Bisbee I have two routes that I do with the intention of comparing the efforts over the span of several weeks and months. The first is a half-mile-ish uphill run that I do as a hard-as-I-can effort. My best time for it pre-knee injury was 6:05 which I whittled down over the course of 3 months, lowering my PR by a few seconds each time. When I time trial'ed it after a week back to running, I managed to hit 5:55. Then, later that same week, I decided to really go for it and wheezed out a 5:36. Fuck yeah, bruh.

The other route I do is a once-a-month trail loop in Brown Canyon in Sierra Vista, AZ. It's a little over 5 miles and not a huge amount of climbing...it's extremely runnable and that's the point for this one. I've only done this route 3 times. The first time was something like 41:00 minutes, but I had gotten a little lost trying to follow the trail. The second time I hit 38:35. Today I ran 36:12 and felt like the effort was hard, but not quite as hard as 1st and 2nd attempts.

Here's the Brown Canyon route.

It's been awhile since I've written straight-forward running shit. I realized the other day that I love reading the minutia of other people's running and...hey, why don't I stop being a dick-tease about it and give the world a peak from time-to-time of my own nerdy jogging pussy?*

*or dick, if you're a lady or a flexible fella. Long-time readers know I like to keep things on a level playing field.

name's on there now. first find your name then scroll up a bit... that's where it'll be at the end of the day too.

fancy hiking trip = so much fucking BASE, you better hope I can't sharpen this mothafucka up in 60 days...

haha, I am the worst shit talker. it probably largely stems from the fact that I really don't care about racing a whole lot. but man, I am pumped for you to come to Oregon. First time up here? got any other plans?

the only base involved here is the freebasing you must be doing if you think you're gonna beat me.

Yes, first time to Oregon and I think we're staying with friends in Portland for a night or two and then getting an air bnb someplace after that. We'd take any suggestions for stuff to do. I'll email you via Facebook this week.